Twilio Adds Analytics to its Voice and SMS Platform

Telephony platform Twilio is now giving developers more insight into their application activities. Now users of the Twilio Voice API and Twilio SMS API have the option to view usage patterns, thanks to a partnership with GoodData. The dashboard shows the last 90 days of call and text volumes, with the option to explore the data further.

"Twilio customers perform millions of calls and text messages every day, and making sense of those business interactions is critical," said Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson. Twilio's entire business is its pay-per-use API. Since customers are paying for it, they're likely also making money from it in some way. The new service, dubbed Twilio Analytics, helps Twilio's customers understand how their applications are using the service.

Understanding usage is an important part of a pay-per-use API. Google's API console provides a similar service for many of its APIs, though only at a basic level. Google also does not charge for many of its APIs.

For Twilio Analytics, Twilio partnered with business intelligence service GoodData, which itself has the GoodData API. The visualization company also has other ready-to-go apps for other providers, including Facebook and Google Analytics.

There's an overview video of the Twilio Analytics service embedded above. It's free to Twilio customers and even lets you embed the dashboard into your own internal site.

Disclosure: Twilio is a ProgrammableWeb sponsor

About the author:Adam DuVander
-- Adam heads developer relations at Orchestrate, a database-as-a-service company. He's spent many years analyzing APIs and developer tools. Previously he worked at SendGrid, edited ProgrammableWeb and wrote for Wired and Webmonkey. Adam is also the author of mapping API cookbook Map Scripting 101.